Their mum never worries about them eating too much food because they always have so much exercise out in the fresh air – and we are always finding interesting places to explore.

Sometimes Henry and Emily come with us too. Henry’s parents have to work long hours and so he spends a lot of time with our family.

Henry is Bill and Bob’s best friend.

When you are walking out in the countryside in the spring, summer or autumn you are surrounded by free food that you can find growing wild in the fields and hedgerows. But you don’t want to take anything if you don’t know whether it is safe to eat or poisonous.

Blackberries though, are something that everybody recognizes.

When you pick blackberries there are two things to remember. Firstly, make sure that you are in a place where you are allowed to take the blackberries and secondly make sure that you are not picking them too close to a road where the pollution of traffic fumes has covered them.

There is something else you should know about when you are out walking. lt is called the Countryside Code. Bill, Bob and Henry have learnt about it at their Beaver Scout meetings.

Basically it is this:

You should follow public footpaths and shut gates behind you. Keep your dog under control, never leave litter behind you and observe signs and notices.

That is all common sense really.

Sometimes you can get through or over a wall or fence by using a kissing gate or stile. Then you don’t have to worry about accidently letting animals out of a field because these devices are designed to be used only by humans not animals (dogs can also get through a kissing gate).

When you go blackberrying also remember to wear old clothes because blackberry brambles have lots of sharp thorns on them that can snag what you are wearing.

And there are so many things that you can do with your blackberries, pies, crumbles, jams, jellies and ice cream.

Or you can cover them with cream or custard, or even put them into a sweet pancake.

lf you want to grow blackberries in your own garden, there are now thornless varieties available.

In the middle of the summer the blackberries begin to emerge out of the flowers

The berries turn from green to red to black

Ripe blackberries

Rosehips are another crop found in hedgerows

Blackberry thickets provide shelter for animals through the winter

This five bar gate has a cattle grid – cars can drive over it and people can just about walk on it but animals can’t because their feet would slip between the bars

A cattle grid

A kissing gate can be used by people but animals can’t get through

(Although a dog on a lead can)

A stile can look like steps…

or a ladder

A squeeze stile

A stile at the bottom of a fence

THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK

And this week Bill and Bob have created another word puzzle for you. This time it is a gap-fill puzzle and all the words are things that are black.

See if you can work out what all the words are.

d_r_n_s_

p_n_h_r

c_o_

w_t_h _a_

b_a_k_o_r_

t_e _i_h_ s_y

c_r _y_e_

l_q_o_i_e

l_c_y _a_

p_t_h

r_v_n

p_p_l

H_n_y’_ h_i_

In fact, Bill and Bob have been very busy this week and have also finally completed their juicing report that was promised to you in Blog Post 81. It contains their conclusions after using their mum’s new juicing machine.

Yellow and red apples make sweeter juice than green ones –

this apple can’t make up its mind which it wants to be.

BILL AND BOB’S JUICING REPORT

PART TWO

You should use ripe fruit because this has the most juice.

You should wash all your fruit before you cut it up.

Cutting the fruit into cubes (about 3cm) works better than slices and gives you the most juice. It also means that the fruit will go into the juicer easily – big chunks will get stuck. Don’t ram the fruit into the tube; it is supposed to go in slowly.

You should put softer fruit like berries or grapes or oranges in first and harder fruit like apples in last.

You can put the apple chunks in a bowl, then the orange, then the berries so that the fruit will be in the right order to take out to put into the juicer when you turn it on. Also the juice that collects at the bottom of the bowl can be added to the juice. Rinse it out the bowl with a tiny drop of water and put it through the juicer last of all to wash all the juice out of the machine and into the juice jug.

Any combination of fruit will probably work, so you can experiment and find out which recipes you like the best. It is strange how some tastes become stronger than others in a mixture and they are not always the fruit you expect them to be. For example if you put strawberries with grapes you will taste the strawberries, but if you put strawberries with cucumber you will taste the cucumber and this is a disappointment.

One good thing is that spinach doesn’t taste, so you can add a handful of raw spinach to any fruit you like.

You can buy or borrow books that have recipes for juices.

You can buy frozen berries in packs, but the berries don’t taste as good as fresh ones. They need to be defrosted before you juice them.

If you use pineapple or grapefruit from cans, it saves you having to cut off the skin and it tastes almost as good as fresh fruit. You also get juice in the tin which you can drain into the juice jug before you start juicing the fruit. This means that you can get quite a high yield (amount) from canned fruit.

The pulp left over from juicing fruit and vegetables is quite dry and doesn’t have much taste. There isn’t too much of it and if you don’t want to eat it or put it in recipes it can be put on the compost heap. Grapefruit and pineapple pulp is alright to eat but carrot is horrible.

You have to remove the skins of oranges and grapefruit and from any other fruit if it will affect the juice in a way you won’t like. Leaving the skin on limes will make the juice quite bitter for example. You don’t need to remove skin from kiwi fruit.

You must take the skin off hard skin fruit like pineapples, mangoes and melons. You must remove the stones and pips from fruit like peaches, cherries, papaya as well. Our mum helps us with this bit.

Bananas don’t work well. It is better to put them into smoothies with milk/yoghurt/ice cream by using a blender.

We thought sweet red apples tasted better than sharper green apples in juice even though we like to eat green apples normally.

If some fruit juice tastes too sharp, you could add honey, but if you choose your combinations well, there shouldn’t be a problem.

If you buy fruit from a market where they are selling a bowl of fruit for £1 you can make sure all the fruit is used up before it goes off. This means that juicing may not be as expensive as you think.

If you use combinations of fruit, you can mix less expensive fruit in with more expensive fruit. You get different kinds nutrients from different kinds of fruit and vegetables.

If you collect large amounts of fruit from your garden in the summer and it is the kind of fruit that doesn’t freeze well, it can still be used for juicing through the winter. Cutting the bruised part off windfall apples in early autumn and juicing what is left is also a good way of collecting fruit for free.

Our favourite juice so far is four oranges to one apple. The apple just adds a little bit of extra sweetness to the oranges. If you add pineapple, it becomes even sweeter.

Eating lots of fruit is good for your health and if you can’t manage to eat piles of fruit, this is a good way of getting the goodness into yourself.

It is important to wash the juicer every day. You will find it is easier to wash it just after you use it and before the pulp dries inside the machine.

You can keep the fruit juice in the fridge for two or three days in a bottle but this doesn’t happen very often in our house because the juice tastes so yummy that we drink it all straight away – and then we soon feel like we want some more.

Some fruit can go brown when it is left as well. This is because it has had contact with the air. This happens especially with some types of apples. The addition of a little lemon juice can help stop this but if you drink the juice straight away it won’t happen.

It is important to wash your teeth 2-3 times a day when you drink lots of fresh fruit juice, but you shouldn’t wash your teeth just after a meal.

Conclusion

Wow! When you’ve tried fresh orange juice or apple juice you will never want to drink boxed juice again.

We invited our cousin Emily to come round and try out some of our recipes. Now we have all tested them and we will give them to you soon.

Watch this space!

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Recipe Spot

This is a recipe for blackberry crumble that you can make from fresh blackberries or any blackberries from the freezer which have become a bit mushy once they have defrosted.

Turn the oven on to 180°c

Put 500g/1 lb of blackberries that have been washed and had their stalks removed into an ovenproof dish

ln a bowl mix up a topping using these ingredients:-

120g/4ozes flour

60g/2oz brown sugar

120g/4ozes butter

60g/2oz chopped nuts like almonds or hazelnuts

When the topping looks like breadcrumbs sprinkle it on the top of the blackberries

When your oven is at 180°c put your crumble onto the middle shelf

Cook for 20-25 minutes

Serve hot or cold with or without cream or custard

Ask permission to use an oven, or ask a grown-up to do the cooking part of the recipe after you have done the weighing and mixing part.

BLOW MY FOGHORN!!!

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lt’s the Weekend!

HOW TO MAKE MY CHEF’S HAT

And here is the pattern for my chef’s hat to make my chef’s outfit complete!

Cut a strip of fabric 48cm/19¼ inches x 18cm/7½ inches.

Cut a circle 28-30cm/12 inches in diameter (You might have a plate roughly this size to draw around) If you want to make a slightly bigger circle to make a fuller top that would work.

Run two lines of strong thread around the outside of the fabric circle in running stitch as near to the edge as you can get it without fraying your fabric – two lines make gathering more controlled.

Sew up the short ends of the strip of fabric right sides together.

Ease the gathered top into one of the long sides of the hat; pinning and then sewing into place along the edge (make sure that the right sides are facing the same way on both pieces).

Fold the strip the right way out and sew the other side to the top as well to secure.

The fold along the centre of the strip should be at the bottom of the hat.

This hat matches the apron on Blog Post 79 and the gloves on Blog Post 81.

TIP

Use 5mm/3/16 inch seams to make the hat fit properly – but it would be worth checking the fit on your Salty Sam toy after stage 4. It is quite a big hat because he has got quite a big head.

That’s because of all the brains l keep in it!

Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.

It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.

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